In the new paper, entitled “The common ancestry of life,” evolutionists Eugene Koonin and Yuri Wolf state that “the evidence in support of [Universal Common Ancestry] provided by comparative genomics is overwhelming.” This non scientific claim is typical in the evolution literature. Evolutionists have plenty of arguments to back it up, and these arguments illustrate the metaphysics which run deep in evolutionary thought.
One of the chief problems with the original paper was its claim to have complete knowledge of all possible explanations for the origins of a set of proteins it analyzed. That is, of course, a non scientific claim. It is one of those little known, unspoken and unseen claims with huge ramifications. If I can make up a list of all possible solutions to a problem, and conveniently all are clearly false except my favorite, then I can claim my favorite to be the right answer—a fact.
This type of contrastive argument runs all through the evolutionary genre. It assumes there are no alternatives of which I have not conceived. And it is not limited to evolutionary thought. Philosopher Kyle Stanford has shown the importance of this problem of unconceived alternatives.
Evolutionists can present scientific-sounding results that prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they’re right. And they are right, if their claim is true. But that takes us outside of science, right where evolutionary thought began.
In committing itself to this metaphysic, the original paper falls squarely within evolutionary thought. And the new paper by Koonin and Wolf, though critical of the first paper, not surprisingly makes the same metaphysical commitment. Evolutionists argue amongst themselves about specks while missing the beam. Here is the relevant passage from the Koonin and Wolf paper:
The alternative to UCA [Universal Common Ancestry] is convergent evolution of highly similar sequences of the universal proteins … Several lines of evidence indicate that convergence is not a viable explanation for the extensive sequence similarity that is observed among universal proteins. First, … We believe that together this evidence makes convergent evolution of the highly similar sequences in over 100 proteins that are confidently traced back to the putative Last Universal Cellular Ancestor (a highly conservative estimate) a virtual impossibility.
There you have it. The only alternative to universal common ancestry is convergent evolution which is a virtual impossibility. No matter that universal common ancestry repeatedly generates false predictions and calls for natural laws to perform all manner of heroics. It must be the right answer. After all, convergent evolution is even worse. As philosopher Elliot Sober admits in his explanation of, as he puts it, Darwin’s Principle, it is not that the likelihood of common descent is high, but rather that the likelihood of the alternative is so low. Religion drives science, and it matters.